Milwaukee Brewers’ Christian Yelich reacts in the dugout after his home run against the Los Angeles Dodgers during the third inning of a baseball game Saturday, April 20, 2019, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

MILWAUKEE — When fans buy a ticket for a game at Miller Park these days, there’s really only one thing on their minds.

Will Christian Yelich homer before or after the Sausage Race?

He did both Saturday, hitting two home runs — one before and one after the grandaddy of costumed mascot racing — as the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Dodgers 5-0 to end their six-game winning streak.

“I was just laughing,” Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun said, explaining the wide grin on his face as he greeted Yelich at home plate following the second home run. “He’s impossibly good right now. He’s making something that is incredibly difficult look so easy. And he’s done it over a large sample size when you go back to the All-Star break last year.”

In the short sample size of the 2019 season, Yelich leads the majors with 13 home runs — one short of the record for home runs before May 1 shared by Albert Pujols (2006) and Alex Rodriguez (2007). With three more home games this month, Yelich should get there.

All 13 of his home runs (and 29 of his major-league leading 31 RBI) have come in the Brewers’ 13 home games including four in the first three games of this series with the Dodgers. In 87 home games at Miller Park since the Brewers acquired him from the Miami Marlins, Yelich has hit 35 homers (with only 14 on the road).

“I don’t look at the records or what we’ve got going on. For me, it’s one day at a time,” said Yelich who won last year’s National League MVP award with a torrid second half. “Focus on the moment, what you want to accomplish that day with your approach. Good or bad, reset the next day.

“I feel pretty comfortable hitting here. We’ve played a lot of games at home, too, already. That’s probably because we have a roof and it’s pretty cold up here at the beginning of the year. It’s not really a home-road thing. It’s just a great hitters’ park. It plays fair. It rewards a good approach. Where I came from in Miami, you can probably put that up there as one of the worst. This one is up there (as a hitters’ park).”

In the more neutral environment of Dodger Stadium last week, the Dodgers held Yelich to two singles and no RBI in 12 at-bats over three games.

“He’s tough,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts understated. “You can stay away but he has the low swing path. You can try and crowd him but he’s seen that. He can hunt balls in and cover balls off the plate like he did against Strip (Friday’s victim, Ross Stripling). So you’ve got to mix it up. You’ve got to change eye levels and sequence really well.

“This guy is obviously a very talented bat-to-ball guy. He thinks through at-bats and how pitchers are going to attack him. You’ve got to stay ahead of him. I thought Hyun-Jin (Ryu) did a good job. I really did. This just shows how locked in he is right now when you can get in the count, six pitches in, and throw a changeup down and in and hit it the other way and not yank it on the ground and hit a first-pitch breaking ball for a homer too. He’s doing a lot of things well.”

Yelich hit his first off Ryu in the third inning Saturday on a 1-and-2 changeup. The opposite-field drive traveled a modest 386 feet into the Brewers bullpen.

In the sixth inning, Yelich was more forceful. He crushed Ryu’s first pitch — a slow curveball that rolled over the heart of the plate with its defenses down — sending it 421 feet into the upper deck above the Dodgers’ bullpen in right field.

“You have to give him a lot of credit,” Ryu said through his interpreter. “The first one, I thought I did a good job of executing and locating the pitch. … The second one, I had stayed away from my curveball in the first couple at-bats so I thought it was a good idea to use my curveball. But he hit that out as well. You can see he is the hottest hitter in baseball right now.”

Other than that, Ryu was strong in his first start back after spending 11 days on the Injured List with a minor groin injury. He gave up just four hits to the non-Yelich Brewers and struck out nine in 5 2/3 innings, matching his strikeout high since returning from shoulder and elbow surgeries in 2015 and 2016.

But there was still more Yelich to be dealt with after Ryu left.

In the seventh, Dodgers reliever Caleb Ferguson gave up a two-out double to Lorenzo Cain. Despite having the right-handed Braun on deck, the strategy was obvious — intentionally walk Yelich and face Braun (a .186 hitter so far this season).

“The way he’s swinging, it didn’t make sense not to walk him,” Braun said. “This year, I’ve been bad against everybody and Yelli has been impossibly good. So with that combination, it made sense for them to do what they did.”

It did. And then Braun hit an 0-and-1 fastball for a three-run home run to put the game away.

“Just a guy (Yelich) who’s swinging the considerably hotter bat you’ve got to take your chance with the other guy,” Roberts said. “We didn’t execute a pitch and Braun put a good swing on it.

“You’ve still got to score runs and we didn’t tonight.”

Joc Pederson led off the game with a single off spot starter Chase Anderson, making his first start of the season for the Brewers. Their next hit didn’t come until the sixth inning off reliever Alex Claudio.

Bill Plunkett has covered everything from rodeo to Super Bowls to boxing (yeah, I was there the night Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear off) during a career that started far too long ago to mention and eventually brought him to the OC some time last century (1999 actually). He has been covering Major League Baseball for the Orange County Register since 2003, spending time on both the Angels and Dodgers beats.